Chip giants AMD and Nvidia return as Canada’s Radical Ventures and Inovia co-lead.
Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) scaleup Cohere has raised $500 million USD ($690 million CAD) in fresh funding and added two former Meta and Uber executives to its C-suite.
The large-language model (LLM) developer’s latest round was led by returning Canadian investors Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. Fellow existing backers also participated, including chip giants AMD (through its venture capital arm AMD Ventures) and Nvidia, Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), and Salesforce Ventures. The Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) was a new investor.
This financing gives Cohere a $6.8-billion USD ($9.4-billion CAD) valuation, an increase over the $5.5 billion USD number from its $500-million USD Series D last summer. The Financial Times was first to report on Cohere’s latest fundraising efforts back in June.
Cohere also announced two new executives. It appointed Canadian computer scientist Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer. Pineau recently departed Meta after serving as its vice president of AI research and leading its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab.
Pineau will direct research and product development at Cohere based out of its new office in Montréal. Cohere has an ongoing partnership with local AI research institute Mila, where Pineau is a core academic member.
Francois Chadwick, who previously served as Uber’s acting chief financial officer (CFO) and played a leadership role during the company’s initial public offering, is joining Cohere as CFO. Chadwick was most recently a partner at consulting firm KPMG and held CFO roles at defence intelligence startup Shield AI and electric vehicle network Volta Charging.
Cohere said it plans to use the funding to bring its enterprise AI solutions to customers worldwide. This builds on recently inked partnerships with large companies and the public sector, including a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government. Last month, the company made its workplace platform North publicly available.
Feature image courtesy Toronto Tech Week.